Toward Bringing Distributed System Design upon Rigorous Footing

The development of distributed systems based on poorly specified abstractions can hinder unambiguous understanding and the creation of common formal analysis methods. In this paper, we outline the design of a system modeling language called DS2, and point out how its primitives are well matched with concerns that naturally arise during distributed system design. We present an operational semantics for DS2 as well as results from an ongoing Scala-based implementation slated to support a variety of state-space exploration techniques. The driving goals of this project are to: (1) provide a prototyping framework within which complex distributed system protocols can be stated and modeled without breaking the primitives down to low level ones, and (2) drive the development of interesting and distributed system-relevant property checking methods (e.g., linearizability).